Your Face in Mine: A Novel

by Jess Row

  Maybe that’s a good thing.

  I feel bad that we never kept up, I say, trying to sound as loose, as conversational, as possible. It wasn’t right, to end things the way we did.

  When was that?

  When was that? After Alan died, of course. After the funeral. What was that sushi place called, in Towson, the place we ate afterward?

  He laughs, weakly, as if I’ve said something mildly funny, and then stretches out his chin and rotates his head ninety degrees in each direction, a calisthenic stretch, only his eyes are open, peering, checking out the room.

  I’m sorry.

  Don’t be sorry, he says. It’s not your problem, is it? Why shouldn’t you want to catch up? But listen, here’s the thing: if you were me, who would you trust with this kind of information, with this particular secret? It’s not like I got one of those scanners and stole someone’s Social Security number off a phone call. The way real people do, the standard way. It’s not criminal. Lord, if it were that easy. Listen, Robin’s a good woman. You’ll meet her. But she’s got a family to protect now. She wouldn’t believe it if I told her today. She’d think I’d gone schizophrenic.

  You have kids?

  Adopted. Twins. Sherry and Tamika. They’ll be eight in December. What’s wrong? You look skeptical.

  I mean, because, biologically—

  I’m officially infertile. Unofficially, vasectomized. Those genes are staying put. But look, what I want to talk about right now is you.

  What about me?

  Well, why do you want to get into this mess? Why not just be a good public-radio guy, station director, whatever it is? If it’s not the money, then what?

  You haven’t even told me what you want me to do.

  It’s right in front of us staring us in the face, so to speak, right? My story. I need someone to tell it. To spring it on the world, the way it needs to be done.

  What you need is a publicist.

  Yeah, maybe, he says. Somewhere along the line. But first I need to have the whole thing worked out. I need a narrative. Not just for myself, you see. There are other people involved. Expose one part of the story and you expose it all.

  You mean the surgery. The doctors, the hospital, the research—

  Of course. And of course you must be curious. But honestly, it’s nothing that surprising. Mostly it’s been done before. Collagen, rhinoplasty, eyelid changes, voice box alterations. A lot of nipping and tucking. You’d be surprised at how little it takes to make a difference.

  And the skin?

  Drugs, he says. Dr. Silpa, my doctor, he’s got it all figured out. He did decades of research on this stuff. Synthetic melanin. Tailored precisely to the shade you want. It’s all proprietary; the patents are in. But look, that’s not what I’m talking about; that’s just research. The technical stuff you can write up in a few pages. What I’m talking about is the story, the emotional logic of the whole thing. That’s the crux of the matter. Why me? Why was I the pioneer? In a hundred years this’ll be as common as a nose job. But there always has to be a first one. Your job is to prove that I’m not out of my mind. Ever heard of Christine Jorgensen?

  No.

  I’m not surprised. But ask your grandparents—anyone who was around in the Fifties—and they’ll know that name. Dimly. Jorgensen was the first person to have a sex change and write a book about it. A Personal Autobiography. I got a copy from eBay; it’s in my office. I’ll show it to you sometime. She was a huge celebrity. When she came back from Denmark—that’s where the surgery was—there were crowds at the airport. This was 1952. The tabloids were all over it. She appeared on talk shows. Sid Caesar made jokes about her. She made it a possibility; fifty years later, it’s just ordinary business. So I’m the Christine Jorgensen of the twenty-first century. That’s the business model. Only now, of course, we have to be global: everywhere at once. Americans are stuck on the idea of race, no question. Here we’re going to be facing some serious hysteria. At first. But the thing is, there are a hundred other ways to play this in a hundred other places.

  Do you have someplace in particular in mind?

  He waves a finger at me.

  Not till you sign on, he says. Then you get the whole picture.

  Sign on to do what? Produce a documentary? Write a book?

  All of it. The whole package. I leave the specifics up to you. What I say is, if someone’s good at telling a story, the format doesn’t really matter. You work in radio, fine. Start with a tape recorder. That’s good. People don’t notice so much. I mean, eventually I want to wind up on Diane Sawyer. But look, baby steps. You start by doing research. Two months of research, give or take. Here and in Bangkok. You’ll be compensated all along the way. Then we make a decision about how we’re going to blow this thing.

  Bangkok, too?

  Of course. That’s where it all happened! My womb. My chrysalis.

  I have to think this through, I say. I mean, I’m interested. Who wouldn’t be? And I’m your friend. I’m still your friend, right?

  You wouldn’t be here otherwise, he says.

  I mean, I wouldn’t hire me, necessarily. For this kind of thing. I’m not one of those people with a huge Rolodex.

  Come on. You’re being modest.

  I’d say I know people who know people. At the Times. The Atlantic. Slate. Politico. HarperCollins. Simon and Schuster. Are there any sure things in this world? No. Could I make it happen? I guess so.

  That’s all I need. But my point is, it’s you. The security has to be absolute. I like to keep things intimate. You’re just in the right spot. Couldn’t have come along at a better time. I know you. Always did. You were always the solid one.

  And I have a stake in this story, too.

  Yeah, you do. Maybe more than you realize.

  He stares at me, and I have the sense—it’s something around the eyes, the way the lids pull back—that’s he about to indicate something, to make a sign, but he doesn’t. Not in any way I can read. What falls into that hole, that chasm, between us? What other than Alan? So that’s what it is. And I almost want to blurt out, apropos of nearly nothing, I’m broken, too. I’d like to have those balls. But this is me we’re talking about, and this is the age of irony, of never making a statement you can’t serve up with a sardonic twist. Well, I say, we came from more or less the same place, right? So why you and not me? I mean, not me specifically. All of us.

  All white people.

  Yeah. I mean, out of all the white people on the planet, why would you be the one to go first, to figure this out? That’s kind of interesting, wouldn’t you say?

  Kind of interesting. This is the story of the fucking century.

  Our salads arrive, enormous piles of cucumber, tomatoes, olives, dolmas, artichokes, feta, and he gazes at me silently for a moment, until the waitress pulls away.

  The future is the future, isn’t it? Isn’t that what I look like? And the future is for those who get there first. I’m asking you to think, you know, entrepreneurially. I know that doesn’t come natural if you’re out of the private sector. But maybe this is your time, Kelly. This could be your moment. God doesn’t close a door without opening a window.

  You go to church?

  Druid Hill Park A.M.E., he says. What, you thought I was going to stay Jewish? Become one of the Black Hebrews, the thirteenth tribe? Come on, he says. Look at me, Kelly. I’m black. If you want to be along for this ride, you have to make your peace with it. Black and never going back. Listen to me, I sound like some kind of crazy missionary.

  No, I say, not a missionary. A convert.

  However you want to put it.

  To buy myself a moment, I take a sip from my water glass, then tip it back and drain the rest. Nothing, it seems to me, has ever been quite as delicious, quite as necessary, as that glass of ice water, tap water, with its faint medicinal aftertaste: fluoride, chlorine. All the ways we are silently, involuntarily, protected. I think of the bourgeois hippies in Marin County, the ones who refuse vac
cinations and believe cancer comes from radiomagnetic fields, who buy shipped-in tanks of water, as if they lived in Haiti. How difficult it is for us, for the insulated ones, to understand what it means to risk anything at all. If I could I would run back through the hallway of time and tell my younger self, stop hedging your bets and learn what it means to have a catastrophe. But all I have now is the terrible present, the catastrophe over and accomplished, and myself, a squeezed-out rag, a rotten iceberg, and this impossible person staring at me and waiting for me to make up my mind.

  Months after the accident, in a particularly courageous moment, I took out the manila envelope of condolence cards, and forced myself to read each one before tossing it into the recycling bin. At the bottom of the stack was a typed sheet of paper without an address or postmark. Or signature. It had been stuffed through the mail slot in the door: there was a rust mark on one crumpled edge. Emanuel Swedenborg, it read. Life goes on even if the vessels that receive life be broken. Life goes into new forms.

  It isn’t enough to wait, I’m thinking. In the meantime, I need something to do.

  Okay, I say, and I hear a little clink, a nail, or a penny, dropped into my glass, a signal that time no longer stands still. I’m interested. Count me in. What’s the first step, then? Interviews?

  Ground rules, he says. Forget you ever knew me before last week. You’re a freelance journalist working on a story about black entrepreneurship, okay? Something long, a think piece. For The New Yorker. You know what I mean. Act a little naïve, but you still have to know your basic shit.

  And how did we meet up?

  Through a friend of a friend of a friend. Facebook. LinkedIn. How it always happens these days. First step is you’re going to shadow me for a few days. A little tour of my world. Can you take the time off?

  I think about Barbara and her silver braids, her enormous, antiquated Dell monitor, and the outrageous numbers scrolling across it.

  I’ll manage something.

  Look, he says, there’s something else. I never said anything about what happened to your family.

  I’d rather you didn’t, if it doesn’t come naturally.

  No, I was holding back. It wasn’t appropriate. But I just have to ask. How are you even standing up? How do you make it through the day?

  I don’t know, I say, which is, of course, the exact truth. There’s no other option, is there? I did all the steps. I saw a therapist. I took medication for a while. You don’t just roll up and die, no matter how bad it is. Happiness, you know, it’s fragile. Whatever you care about, it’s fragile. That’s about all I can say. I’m no hero.

  Well, now, he says. Welcome to the rest of your life. O brave new world, that has such people in’t! You know that line?

  Of course, I say, startled, everybody knows that line, and then I remember: we read it in high school, junior year, in Mr. Fotheringill’s class, “Utopias, Dystopias, and Fantasy Worlds.” Jesus Christ, I say, it came true.

  Yeah. Without taking the Lord’s name in vain and all.

  Right. Sorry.

  We look at each other and laugh, and I feel tears, fat tears, swelling out of the corners of both eyes: something like terror, and something like joy, for the moment indistinguishable.

  6.

  As a child I was famous for my lungs: I could swim a length and a half of an Olympic-sized pool holding my breath. On the swim team, in middle school, I won sprints that way, on a single gulp of air, swimming blind, my field of vision turning orange, then black, clamping my teeth around the balloon of air swelling in my mouth. But my favorite trick of all was to pinch my nose and sink slowly to the bottom of the pool, dribbling bubbles like a scuba diver, till I rested, face-up, on the bottom, looking at the surface’s glassy underside, the world in reverse. I could stay down there for seven or eight seconds, which in underwater time is forever.

  Now, an adult again, I heave myself out of the water, checking to make sure my Downtown Athletic Club guest pass is still attached to my swimsuit, and the bored attendant—a short Latina in a black track suit, who looks too young even to have graduated from high school—leaves off texting long enough to hand me a thick, fleecy towel. I’ve finished as many laps as I can stand; swimming for exercise—really, any kind of repetitive exercise—bores me to death. What I love about water is being able to slip into it and cut the world off, sealing that membrane of silence. Maybe I was one of those babies who never wanted to leave the womb.

  Is it always this quiet in the middle of the day? I ask her.

  Nah. Not always. Sometimes there’s conventions. But otherwise, I don’t know, I guess people have to work.

  I dry my face, my neck, and work downward, scrubbing my flaccid, untoned arms, my knobby chest with its spray of moles, its odd patches of hair. I haven’t been in a pool—haven’t been in public, in a bathing suit—in the seven months since August. And like all people of my complexion, who live in northern climes, whose skin barely sees the sun eight months of the year, I’ve turned the color of white wax or lake ice, the color of an eye clouded by glaucoma.

  Martin, in the next lane, hasn’t stopped once in twenty minutes. He alternates between freestyle and breaststroke, dipping and ducking his head like an efficient waterbird. I wouldn’t call him a natural swimmer—he scissor kicks, and doesn’t keep his line straight, veering across into the left side of the lane—but he compensates with stamina. You can see it in his exaggerated shoulders, his fistlike calves. If you weren’t here, he told me, I’d go for an hour without a break. It’s the only way I can think.

  In my bag is the manila folder he handed me as we walked in. Some notes I started taking about a year ago, he said. Thought I’d write a book. Anyway, it might be a place to start. Or it might be pure bullshit.

  I dry my hands carefully and open the folder. Ten pages, stapled, like a high school term paper, with his name in the upper left-hand corner.

  ON RACIAL IDENTITY DYSPHORIA SYNDROME (RIDS): A SELF-DIAGNOSIS

  This paper is offered as an attempt to open up dialogue about one of the major overlooked mental phenomena of our time. I offer it as a personal reflection and an appeal for scientific and pharmaceutical research into this urgent issue.

  I have the physical appearance of an African American male. In seven years of living with this appearance, it has never been questioned or found unusual by any of my friends or my intimate partners, including my wife of four years, who is also African American. However, this appearance is based on a carefully created medical procedure that was carried out in Bangkok, Thailand, in 2001–2, by Dr. Binpheloung Silpasuvan and his medical associates. Specifically, Dr. Silpasuvan carried out a series of facial surgeries, scalp surgeries, body-sculpting procedures, and pigmentation treatments, transforming me from my original appearance as a Caucasian-Jewish “white” male into a convincing African American. I returned to the United States with an altered passport and have since presented myself as the child of adoptive white parents, now dead, with no information about my biological roots. This is the story that everyone around me—my wife, my intimate friends, my pastor—takes at face value.

  Those are the scientific facts, shocking as they may be. What is even more shocking is the syndrome that drove me to this extreme, costly, and risky decision. I discovered, in my early adulthood (I was twenty-eight at the time of the procedure), that my long history of psychological problems, including depression, agoraphobia, and involvement in illegal activities, was the result of being born in the wrong physical body. I term this “racial identity dysphoria” because I believe it is in many ways similar to the gender dysphoria that is so commonly reported in the news.

  What justifies my belief that I was in fact born in the wrong race, as transsexuals claim to be born in the wrong sex? Some will surely believe that this is nothing more than a publicity stunt, or perhaps a perverse expression of “white guilt.” The first charge, I believe, is answered by the fact that I have kept my true identity a secret for so long, and that until now I h
ave made no effort to “go public.”

  Guilt just did not enter into it. Not then, not now. I never felt that it was “bad” or “wrong” to be a white person or a Jew. Of course, I was aware of the history of slavery, the civil rights movement, apartheid, job discrimination, and so on; but I was never led to feel a sense of responsibility or even involvement in the history of black people in America. My father, my only surviving family member (my mother died when I was an infant; he is now also deceased, as of 1995), was a profoundly self-absorbed person, a historian, an archivist, who had very little interest in contemporary society at all. I grew up around black people and have had black friends for as long as I could remember, but I was not, to any great degree, ever made fun of, isolated, mocked, or bullied for being white. In other words, my dysphoria cannot be associated with some trauma, some discreet, explicable, psychological cause, at least not one I can identify. Transsexuals are usually given a battery of tests before they undergo sex-change procedures. Were there to be such a test for racial reassignment surgery, I believe I would pass it.

  What I can say is that I always (until the moment my bandages were taken off) knew in some way that I lived in the wrong body. I’ve spoken with transsexuals (in fact, I came to know a few of them during my time in Thailand, as they are Dr. Silpasuvan’s primary base of customers) who’ve told me exactly the same thing. There is an inchoate sense in which something is wrong long before there is a sense of what could be done to make it right.

  It helped (you could say, in a sense at least) that I did not grow up in a judgmental family or a family that really was very interested in my appearance or what I might do to modify it. I never experienced any pressure to dress a certain way or live up to a certain kind of social appearance. In fact, whether or not I put on clothes in the morning was almost entirely up to me. Furthermore, beginning in my early teenage years, I existed in a social milieu that, to put it bluntly, tolerated, even encouraged, freaks.